Results Come First At The New HUD

By HENRY G. CISNEROS

On March 2, President Clinton signed a performance agreement directing the Department of Housing and Urban Development to achieve specific priorities between now and 1996.

This agreement is an historic milestone on the road to a government that serves people better and costs less. It is also the culmination of a year-long process of reinvention at HUD and the beginning of a productive new era in HUD's history.

It's no secret that in the 1980s, HUD failed in its mission to promote affordable housing and community development. The department was wracked by ethics scandals and waste. That sorry period is behind us.

Under the agreement with the White House, HUD is committed to: real reductions in homelessness; revitalization of our country's most severely distressed public housing; increased housing production; reduction of racial barriers to residential mobility; reinvigoration of economically distressed communities. HUD's performance agreement with the White House sets time-specific, quantifiable standards for measuring progress toward these priorities.

To meet these goals, we at HUD are literally changing the way we do business.

Change has been in the wind since last year. You could have sensed it coming last summer. In Chicago and Richmond, Va., HUD tried a fresh approach to a longstanding problem — the buildup of vacated, single-family homes in its inventory of foreclosed properties. HUD offered to sell homes at a 30-percent discount to nonprofit groups, provided they agreed to rehabilitate them and sell them in turn to low-income families. HUD had planned to move 100 homes through this experimental, pilot initiative. By the program's end, more than 200 had been sold.

In Milwaukee, where the accumulation of HUD-foreclosed, deteriorating homes has become a severe problem, we've already given our field staff more authority to work with the city and nonprofit groups to make these homes habitable again and affordable to low-income buyers.

Early last year, a review team from HUD's Cleveland field office visited the Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority in eastern Ohio. The Cleveland office had put the TMHA high on its review priority list because of serious problems — high vacancy rates, rapid resident turnover, drugs and crime — at Highland Terrace in the city of Warren.

The HUD team helped housing authority staff and board members, public housing residents and local public officials craft a plan to improve conditions at Highland Terrace. Within five months: vacancies at the 200-unit family development were reduced by nearly 60 percent; the development's appearance was markedly improved; a neighboring, deteriorating convenience store that had been a center for drug and criminal activity was closed; a community policing program was begun; residents' involvement in the day-to-day affairs of the development increased.

Results — not obstruction, scandals and indictments — are the new HUD's most important product, and we have undertaken a major reorganization to ensure that constructive approaches to local problems will be the rule rather than the exception at our department.

We are eliminating an entire middle layer of regional bureaucracy. We are cutting red tape and streamlining procedures at headquarters. Thanks to the elimination of the department's regional bureaucracy, our field operations — in housing, public housing, fair housing and community development — will be linked directly to headquarters offices in each program area for the first time in HUD's history. The establishment of this direct line authority from Washington to the field will enable HUD to respond more quickly to local needs.

The heart of HUD's reorganization is an empowered field staff. We are shifting decision-making from Washington to field offices around the nation. That means that local HUD employees — who are, or will be most knowledgeable about and sensitive to the needs and concerns of local communities, and who deal most

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directly with our customers — will have the authority they need to resolve issues at the local level. Our job in Washington will be to give them the support they need to do their jobs.

We are putting a premium on problem-solving, and we understand that the best solutions are developed at the grass roots. For this reason, we are asking our field office staff to become more engaged in local communities than ever before. In each of our 81 field offices, we will be reaching out to community leaders, business executives, state and local government officials, other federal agencies, neighborhood groups, nonprofit agencies and other community institutions to assess local needs and priorities, identify available public and private resources and develop coordinated, comprehensive approaches to local problems.

We won't stop at these 81 offices; as our capabilities improve and our resources grow, we'll be reaching out to other communities as well.

This kind of outreach and teamwork will be HUD's hallmark in the future.

The Chicago, Richmond, Milwaukee and Trumbull experiences are harbingers of things to come at the new HUD and proof that the way we do business does make a difference.

We're fast emerging from a cocoon of insular bureaucracy to become a results-driven agency that works proactively with local government and community residents to improve the lives of citizens from coast to coast. •

81st IML ANNUAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS AND TOPICAL SUBJECTS The IML is currently calling for presentation proposals and topic suggestions for the 1994 IML Annual Conference. All presentation proposals should: Identify and describe the topic to be presented; State the amount of time requested for the presentation; Indicate if audio/visual equipment is needed; List the name, title, address, telephone number, and credentials of all presenters; For all topic suggestions: The subjects should be narrowly defined to address specific issues of timely importance to municipal officials, and If at all possible, suggestions for presenters at the meetings should be included; The deadline for presentation submissions and topic suggestions is May 1, 1994. Send to: Kenneth A. Alderson Assistant Executive Director Illinois Municipal League PO Box 3387 Springfield, IL 62708-3387

Page 26 / Illinois Municipal Review / April 1994